Famine killed over 70 million people in the 20th century - a bald statistic that reflects inexcusable failure in predicting and preventing famines. Yet, the capacity to abolish famine in terms of food production and distribution exists. An Institute of Development Studies working paper catalogues the human cost of famine over the last century and asks: why do famines still occur? The study suggests that to rid the planet of famine this century technical capacity such as food production and distribution is essential, but equally crucial is more political will - both nationally and internationally - than has hitherto been the case.

Famine - from Nigeria in 1903 to North Korea in the late 1990s - has claimed over 70 million lives through starvation, hunger-related diseases, and disease resulting from famine. Yet, what exactly does famine mean? Would alternative definitions of famine be more useful? Is it possible to quantify the loss of life to famine? The paper explores these questions and reviews different debates concerning age and sex-specific mortality risk, and the roles of starvation and disease. Secondly the paper examines three competing explanations of what causes famine: demographics, economics (the failure of entitlements), and politics or ‘complex emergencies’. Lastly the paper discusses famine prediction and prevention during the 20th century.

Research findings include:

• Simple interpretations of famines as natural disasters have given way to more nuanced understandings of the negative synergies between natural triggers, and political blame such as ineffective policy, war, or inadequate international response.
• Food crises have lately concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa where interactions between drought and civil war, in particular, triggered famine.
• Vulnerable populations are much smaller in Africa than in Asia and Russia and so the death toll in recent famines is far lower than in earlier famines.
• Links between crop failure and famine have been severed: most recent food crises have been adequately met by local and international responses.
• Significant response failures are usually due to political rather than technical reasons.
• Demographic, economic and political theories of famine causation abound but each one oversimplifies the issues due to disciplinary specialisation.

Policy implications include suggestions that:

• Each famine is unique and needs to be approached as such with the full range of analytical tools applied to each individual case - food availability decline, market failure, exchange entitlement collapse, complex emergencies - as appropriate.
• If famine is to be eradicated, political will - national and international – is more essential at this point than technical (food production and distribution) capacity.
• An ‘anti-famine contract’ should be established at the global level to be enforced as necessary by regulators from beyond the national state.

Source(s):
'Famine in the Twentieth Century' IDS Working Paper #105 Institute of Development Studies, Brighton by Stephen Devereux (1999)

Funded by: Unknown

id21 Research Highlight: 11 August 2000

Further Information:
Stephen Devereux
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RJ, UK

Tel: +44 (0)1273 606 261
Fax: +44 (0)1273 621 202/691 647
Contact the contributor: S.Devereux@ids.ac.uk

Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK

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